741 titles for World languages is not a lot (additional materials may be applicable to language learning, but I do not see the most commonly requested foreign language films used in the department which we are currently trying to rescue across the demise of VHS). Any particular silo of information is not comprehensive (given the power of the network effect, YouTube wins hands-down most if the times),

any content is difficult to integrate into a language skill curriculum,

any added interface restrictions may make it more difficult, not more stable,

not unlike YouTube, files you may have used, even linked, can get removed.

the website seems to be available only on campus – even if you are logged into your campus account (university VPN will likely help, and not, given that it has video throughput issues).

Students can now easily video-record their own screens during class presentations – not only when using PowerPoint; instead students could demo a website, like their Facebook page.

Last year, we were limited to PowerPoint’srecord slideshow with timing and narration feature, and either send the PPSX (small, but requires the PowerPoint viewer) or the “Save as” video (new in PowerPoint 2010; computing intensive and large file size).

my langlabemailer emailed them as attachment (so far tested to allow for 25MB attachment size, the equivalent of 7-8 minute screencast, a hefty space to fill in L2! We also established: 45MB is too much… ) to the originating student and teacher, for review, grading –

and – provided it passes muster as an attractive and significant piece – possibly for re-use in the student’s language learner ePortfolio.

During the presentation, students followed more closely – which seemed to increase their attention and comprehension -, thanks to audio and screen being shared to them from the presenter, using the Sanako’s “Model student” feature.

Tired of burning, lugging around, inserting, ejecting, or forgetting, losing, scratching and replacing CD- and DVD- media, or hard- and thumb drives to handle your large multimedia files? Do you have internet and web browser where you need to access and play your files? Then you can use UNCC Google Apps instead.

Click on the Hard-drive-icon in the upper left and on “files”, select a video file:

(many formats and underlying codecs supported, including Flash, MOV, AVI, WMV, MPG. File size limits: currently “every user is given 1GB of free storage space for files” (not enough for much HD footage, but difficult to upload, and didn’t Google Drive just increase this limit to 5GB, or does this not carry over to Google Apps? Stay tuned for updates), click “Start upload”..

Wait until upload is finished, and then, depending:

if you want to share the file with colleagues, click on “share” (appears after “cancel”) and fill out the dialogue. You can share your file both

if you just want to play the file yourself (including to your students in the classroom), you are already done.

Go to your files and click on the file in the list to play the video:

Also, you can always “get your file back” by “Download”: (and note you can also prevent users from downloading the files. This is useful if you only want to temporarily share it, but later revoke permissions).

DVDs are getting a bit long in the tooth, not to mention VHS, and can form a real obstacle or time-consuming distraction in an educational setting, from handling the media to finding compatible software and/or hardware players for the media.

Fortunately, there is a now a better way to make video clips available to students than uploading them to YouTube.com:

Not different from YouTube.com, you still need to edit out the segment from the DVD that you want to show in your class, uploading a full DVD I do not intend to test.

From this example, you can also get an idea how long the server-side encode takes before the video an be streamed back to students: the short clip of a few minutes here starts playing back at 12:40. Naturally, a teacher would prepare their course, including all video uploads, before the term starts or possibly before the week starts, or, in extremis, before the class starts – in practice, only the – extremely unlikely – scenario where the teacher would try and upload the video during the class is not supported.

Moodle Kaltura facilitates making segments of video (created from e.g. source DVD with the video editor of your choice) available for film studies classes, within the bounds of Fair Use and the Teach Act, since it makes video

easily available (streamed to anywhere where Adobe-Flash runs),

but only to those who have an account in the Moodle installation and are registered for the course

In addition, access to the video segments can be restricted further (by choosing from the management options that Moodle affords),

The demonstration includes the server-side encoding which happens only once during teacher upload – you do not have to wait for it to finish, just if you want to check immediately, like I do on the example whether your upload went through.